


As the Unchanging, Many-Colored Sea

by inexplicifics



Series: The Accidental Warlord and His Pack [22]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Drawing, Drinking, F/M, Gender Dysphoria, Misgendering, Trans Female Character, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:34:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26331232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inexplicifics/pseuds/inexplicifics
Summary: Over the years, Serrit of the Vipers finds brothers, a friend, a lover, a leader worth following, and, eventually, herself.
Relationships: Gweld (The Witcher)/Serrit (The Witcher)
Series: The Accidental Warlord and His Pack [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683661
Comments: 254
Kudos: 2681





	As the Unchanging, Many-Colored Sea

Serrit’s always figured feeling vaguely uncomfortable in your own skin is just part of being a Witcher. He’s old enough that he can’t really recall much of his childhood, before the Grasses made him a monster only slightly less vicious than the ones he hunts, but pretty much as long as he _can_ remember, he’s felt like there’s something...sort of wrong. Not _damaged_ \- he’s as fit as any other Witcher, apart from the inevitable scars, and he’s certainly not missing any important things like fingers or knees or anything like that. Just...off. Like a note just barely out of tune, or the way his brothers’ scents go sour when they’ve had a dose of Black Blood.

There aren’t any women in Gorthur Gvaed, deep in the mountains of Tir Tochair. The Viper School doesn’t take girl-children, and no human woman would want to spend any time in a keep full of _Vipers_ , vicious as their kind tend to be. So Serrit doesn’t actually encounter a woman until his first year on the Path, and then - well, humans don’t take well to being stared at by Witchers, so Serrit gets good at watching human women out of the corners of his eyes, pretending he’s looking at something else entirely. They’re sort of fascinating, and not, he comes to realize over the course of a dozen winters’ worth of gossip with his brothers, in the same way the _other_ Witchers find them fascinating. He doesn’t particularly want to _fuck_ them. He just - they’re so _soft_ , and their hair is usually longer and sometimes a little shinier than men’s, and their skirts go _swish_ in a way that sounds a little like a snake’s hiss.

He thoroughly baffles a whore in Novigrad by paying her fee without complaint (high though it is, for the risk of serving a Witcher) just for the opportunity to _look_ at her. Her curves, her soft skin, even the way she carries herself, her center of gravity and the way she _walks_ , are nothing like the way his brothers look. Nothing like the way _he_ looks, though Serrit does mostly do his best not to really see his own reflection, or pay much attention to what he’s doing when he’s bathing, apart from making sure to get all the ick of travel and monster-hunting off.

It’s not desire, what he sees when he looks at her. Serrit knows desire well enough. It’s something maybe a little closer to _longing_.

Well, no Witcher could ever be so soft-handed, so soft-skinned, so _soft_. She’d be dead in a single day upon the Path. Perhaps he’s only jealous of the fact that she _doesn’t_ have to spend her life traveling and killing things and usually getting stiffed on the payments, and that softness is simply the most obvious physical sign of the difference between them.

(That doesn’t feel right either, but Serrit can’t imagine what _else_ it could be.)

He does decide, a few weeks later, that while there’s no way he could ever have soft hands and unscarred skin again, he could - he could maybe grow his hair out. If he keeps it tied back, it won’t be _that_ much of a liability in battle, and he’s quite skilled enough to compensate for any minor advantage it might give his opponents, monsters or men though they might be. He doesn’t bother hacking his hair short with a dagger for the rest of the year, and by the time he makes it back to Gorthur Gvaed, it’s down to his shoulders. It brushes against his skin gently when he lets it out of the tight braid he’s learned to keep it in, and it feels...sort of nice, really.

Also he can hide a spare garrotte in the braid, which is the excuse he uses when Letho gives him a curious look. Letho shrugs and doesn’t mention it again, and Auckes just nods almost approvingly and doesn’t say a damn thing, and none of the other Vipers even care enough to notice.

He teaches himself to sketch, mostly so he can make a bestiary of the monsters he’s killed. He’s not fool enough to draw the _men_ he’s killed, but he does draw women: that whore from Novigrad, from deeply embedded memory, and then others, women he passes on the Path, peasants in the fields and merchants’ wives in the towns and barmaids sashaying between the tables. He gets quite good. His brother Vipers, when they discover his talent, offer to pay him for sketches made to their specifications, and he makes a fair little bit of coin each winter, drawing women in seductive poses, curvaceous and lovely, wide-eyed and wanting.

He’s just as glad he’s alone in his room, one winter about thirty years after he gains his medallion, when he looks down at the figure he’s been absent-mindedly sketching and discovers it’s himself.

Well.

Not quite himself. Himself, but softer. Himself, but _female_. Hair worn loose around his shoulders, face a little less angular. A hint of curves, not the lush sort of body a wealthy merchant’s wife or an expensive whore might have, but the layer of padding that a reasonably successful peasant might accrue. Breasts, small enough not to interfere with his fighting style, but unmistakable all the same. A thatch of hair between his thighs, and no prick to be seen, and hips a little broader than his own truly are.

He stares for a while at what he’s drawn, what he hadn’t even realized he _wanted_ until his own traitorous hands sketched it out onto the page. He looks until he’s memorized every line and curve of it, this impossible desire, and then he very carefully tears the page out of his notebook and feeds it into the fire on the hearth, watching as it burns away to fine grey ash.

*

He keeps sketching, because it’s useful to have the bestiary and anything that can make him a little spare coin is welcome, but he is very careful never to let himself get lost in his own head again, never again to draw that other shape he does not have. He almost cuts his hair, almost shaves his head like Auckes - the way the hair brushes against his shoulders, gentle and soft, is a reminder of the drawing, the impossibility, the _longing_ for what he cannot have. But a Witcher’s life has few enough pleasures, and Serrit _likes_ his hair. He keeps it long. It’s a small enough indulgence.

He hunts, and he kills monsters and men alike, and he trades stories and drawings for rough jokes and hard coin with his brothers in Gorthur Gvaed each winter, and life goes on. He accumulates some interesting new scars, and some hair-raising new stories, and learns to make a seven-stranded braid. He drags Letho out of a dungeon once, and joins Auckes on a hunt for a clutch of slyzards which nearly kills both of them. He spends one long summer chasing a fucking barghest from one side of the continent to the other, and when he finally catches the damned thing it’s to discover a damned _Wolf_ has killed it.

He isn’t sure, even at the time, how him trying to punch the damned Wolf turns into the two of them rolling about on the grass, kissing like they want to bite each other bloody, clawing at each other as viciously as their namesake animals might. He’s even less sure how he ends up rolling over and letting the damned Wolf _have_ him, but he has to admit the fucker is _good_ at it. It’s...a lot better than the few times he’s shelled out coin to convince a whore to let him share her bed. A _lot_ better.

It’s not quite _right_ , but it is _good_.

So he doesn’t slit the damned Wolf’s throat when the fucker has the audacity to _fall asleep_ next to him - who does that? Who falls asleep next to a _Viper_? Gods-damned idiot would _deserve_ it if Serrit killed him, for fuck’s sake - but he does take a lock of flame-red hair from the Wolf’s shaggy head, and takes the barghest corpse, too. He spent the whole damn summer chasing it, he can damned well get the fucking reward, and fuck the Wolf anyhow.

He’s not surprised when the damned Wolf catches up to him in town, growling about losing out on his bounty. He’s also not surprised when their argument turns, by some implausible alchemy, to fucking again on the rickety old bed in the filthy inn room which was all Serrit could afford.

And somehow, he’s not surprised when they meet again, and again, as the years roll by. The damned Wolf - Gweld, apparently, and Serrit starts using his name after a couple of years, because ‘damned Wolf’ is a bit much to snarl in bed - always seems oddly delighted to see Serrit, though he does growl a bit when Serrit steals his kills. But for a Witcher, he’s a remarkably good-natured sort of fellow. Serrit hasn’t spent a lot of time with good-natured people, and distrusts it on principle, but the damned Wolf hasn’t tried to knife him in the back yet, and _is_ a damned good fuck, so he...sort of maybe likes seeing that head of shaggy red hair every so often. Maybe goes looking himself, a few times, when it’s been a couple years between meetings. Gweld doesn’t die, and neither does Serrit, which is about as much as a Witcher can ask, and Gweld isn’t fool enough to try to make their meetings any more than they are, any more than two compatible Witchers spending a little time finding what pleasure they can on the Path, so Serrit doesn’t have to stab him somewhere nonfatal and then spend the next several decades carefully never crossing paths with him again.

So that’s alright. It’s not quite _right_ , nothing is ever quite _right_ , but it’s...it’ll do.

*

It’s forty autumns after Serrit’s first year on the Path when he saves a harvest festival from a half-crazed leshen, and the humans decide that the proper reward - aside from the coin, which they _do_ give him - is to spend the entire festival bringing him drinks. This town apparently specializes in a sort of plum-based alcohol which is potent enough to be a close cousin to White Gull, and Serrit has...a little too much. Maybe a _lot_ too much, given that he can’t actually remember the latter half of the evening, and wakes up in his room at the inn the next morning wearing a much-battered crown of wheat stalks and a _skirt_.

He gets up, and maybe he’s still a little drunk, because he doesn’t tear the skirt off right away. He’s alone in the room, anyhow, there’s no one to see if he maybe walks back and forth a little. The skirt goes _swish_ around his ankles, and he finds himself swaying a little as he walks, just to see how it works. The fabric is a little heavier than trousers, soft against his palms, and his calluses catch against it.

There’s no one to know but him if he unbraids his hair and does a little twirl and watches the skirt and his hair swirl out in near-identical arcs.

And then he stands there in the middle of the floor, staring at the blank wall - staring at _nothingness_ , and trying hard to think of nothing at all.

There’s no point in thinking about what you can’t have; every Witcher learns _that_ lesson young.

The skirt comes with him when he leaves, though. It’s good fabric, and well-made; he might be able to sell it for a little coin, or maybe rip it up for bandages if he needs to.

Somehow or other, he doesn’t end up ripping it up or selling it. It lives in the bottom of his pack until he gets to Gorthur Gvaed, and then it ends up stuffed at the very bottom of his clothes chest, and he doesn’t think about it. He’s very good at not thinking about things, when he needs to be.

*

He’s well into his sixties when the summons to Kaer Morhen comes, and apart from _everything_ else about the whole thing, the most interesting part is meeting the Cat Witchers. Well, three Cats in specific: Dragonfly, and Vesper, and Rach.

 _Female_ Witchers.

Serrit’s heard rumors, now and again, that the Cats took girl-children, but he’s never realized any of them made it through the Grasses, much less the other Trials. But Dragonfly and Vesper and Rach are unmistakably female, and unmistakably _Witchers_. Serrit manages to spar against all of them, that first winter, and finds them as fierce and fast and deadly as any of their brothers. There is no softness to them, no delicacy; they are all whipcord and scars, the same as any other Witcher.

But they are _women_.

It makes something deep within him shiver with longing, to know that it _can_ be done: one can be a woman and a Witcher both.

 _He_ can’t, obviously. But...but it’s _possible_.

He doesn’t exactly _befriend_ the three Cats - Vipers and Cats tend not to get on too well - but he finds himself sparring with them more often than random chance can explain, in the months and years that follow the Witchers choosing to follow the White Wolf. They’re fast and sneaky and dangerous, and it’s good training, but also - also it’s an odd, painful pleasure to see them fight, to challenge himself against their skill.

He _does_ befriend Zofia, when she arrives, or more accurately she befriends _him_. She’s purely human, utterly untouched by any sort of magic or mutagen, but she’s a warrior all the same, skillful enough to impress even Vipers, stubborn enough to stay at the keep even after she learns that she will never be faster, stronger, deadlier than even the least of the Witchers in the Warlord’s army. She’s blunt and honest and utterly uninterested in foolish contests of strength, and she gets on with the Vipers surprisingly well - with Auckes and Serrit and Letho, at least. Most humans don’t care for Viper Witchers, but she seems comfortable enough in their company, and Serrit...he won’t say he _studies_ her, precisely, but he pays attention. To the way she wears her hair, the way she dresses, the way she walks. The way she knows herself to be a woman and a warrior both, and doesn’t even bother scoffing at Clovis’s stupid taunts. She tells good stories, too. She won’t speak about the time before she became a mercenary, and none of the Vipers pries - a person’s pain is their own, sometimes the only thing they truly _have_ \- but she has a wonderful hoard of tales about her comrades-in-arms, the people she’s met and the things she’s seen and done.

It’s the first time Serrit’s had a friend who wasn’t also a brother, and even among the Vipers, Letho and Auckes are the only two he’d truly call _friends_. Vipers don’t make friends easily. Serrit wouldn’t even necessarily call _Gweld_ a friend, for all that he and the Wolf have been fucking whenever they meet for years on the Path, and now that they’re in the same keep, end up in bed together at least a few nights in every week. The Wolf is _friendly_ , sure, but Vipers don’t trust easily. It’s one thing to share a bed and a good fuck, another to share any sort of actual _intimacy_. Three friends is already more than most Vipers ever have; Serrit figures trying to add a _lover_ would be just idiotic.

Then Auckes and Zofia become lovers, and Serrit decides he really shouldn’t bother to predict _anything_ anymore.

*

It’s an utterly unremarkable evening about three years after Ard Carraigh when Zofia, who has been telling stories of the stupidest shit her old comrades-in-arms used to get up to, to the riotous approval of a couple dozen Vipers and Cats and Wolves, mentions offhandedly and without any particular emphasis ‘that time I had to patch Dorian up after he got himself stabbed in the leg, and I spent half a minute panicking that someone’d cut his damned _balls_ off before he remembered to tell me he’d never had any to begin with.’

Thank fuck, someone _else_ asks for clarification. Serrit is too busy trying to keep his breathing and his heartbeat calm and even. Zofia shrugs and allows as how Dorian’s parents thought they had a daughter. And then she launches into a story of one of the apparently extremely reckless Dorian’s _other_ misadventures, and Serrit goes and steals some of the Manticores’ fucking awful berry-flavored White Gull and holes up in his room and drinks the whole fucking bottle. It takes that much before he’s drunk enough to look down into the depths of his own soul, to the dark corner where he keeps the memory of that burned drawing, the feeling of the skirt swishing around his ankles, the longing he’s never been able to articulate.

How the fuck did this Dorian _do_ it? Just - switch?

Well, presumably it involved running away to join a mercenary company, which isn’t really an option Serrit has.

Very carefully, like he’s creeping up on a fucking _leshen_ and a single wrong move is going to get him mobbed by every creature in the damned forest, Serrit tries to imagine telling his brothers -

Telling _her_ brothers -

Nope.

Serrit goes and steals another couple of bottles of White Gull, and after about another half bottle, feels up to trying that again.

Telling her brothers that _she_ -

More White Gull clearly required.

Telling her brothers that she’s a _woman_.

The thought aches like a healing wound.

Would it be worth it? Would her brothers laugh and jest, or claim there _are_ no female Vipers - that she cannot be woman and Witcher both? Would they seem to acknowledge her, and then begin to treat her differently, as though she is not still and always the same person she has ever been, deadly and vicious as all her School are? Or would they shrug, as Zofia’s mercenary comrades apparently did, and call her ‘sister’ - does she even _want_ to be called ‘sister’? - and go on as they have always done?

She cannot do as Dorian did, and leave everything behind to remake herself among strangers. A Viper she is, and a Viper she will always remain, and she swore herself to the White Wolf’s noble folly - Vipers may not be as prone to oaths as _Griffins_ are, but Serrit keeps her word when she’s given it.

She finishes off the rest of the White Gull, and wakes in the morning with a _splitting_ hangover, and apparently smells enough like frustration and pain that nobody even talks to her until dinner, and by that point she’s decided to just...wait a while, until she can think about this without being too drunk to stand, until she can open her mouth and just _say_ what she wants without the words drying up on her tongue the way she’s sure they would right now.

‘A while,’ for a Witcher, can be quite a long time indeed. In part, this is because it’s very nearly impossible to keep a secret, in Kaer Morhen, if you ever speak it aloud. Serrit is reasonably sure that Letho and Auckes and Zofia, at least, would take her truth in stride, but she doesn’t want to deal with everyone _else_ in Kaer Morhen having opinions on it, so it’s easier to just...not. She’s got plenty of practice at not thinking about things - about _this_ thing specifically - and though it’s a bit harder, now that she’s admitted to _herself_ why it is that she’s always felt that discomfort in her own skin, it’s not _that_ hard. If it’s an injury, it’s a minor scrape at worst, one of the ones that ought to heal over in less than a day, leaving no scar behind.

An injury that’s reopened half a dozen times in every passing day, unknowingly, by those who call her ‘brother,’ but still. Minor, in the grand scheme of things. And a Witcher is used to dealing with pain.

Zofia asks her, once, if she's well - picks a good time to do it, too, early one afternoon when everyone else has gone off on their own errands, and Zofia and Serrit, locked in a friendly Gwent match, are the only ones in the great hall besides the maids scrubbing down the tables, who are far enough away not to hear.

Serrit considers all her options, and decides she doesn't want to lie to Zofia. Not about this.

"Y'know your friend," she says at last. "Dorian."

Zofia nods. Serrit swallows. "Did you ever meet anyone who went the other way?"

Zofia considers that, chin on her fist. "Guess I have now," she says at last. "You want I should call you 'sister,' then?"

Serrit shakes her head. "No. Not yet. I - not yet. But." She shrugs. "Now you know."

"Now I know," Zofia agrees. "Tell me if you do want anything to change." She plays another card, and Serrit returns to the game with immense relief. Saying it aloud, even once, is - well, it's a strange relief. It solves nothing, it changes nothing, but it's a relief all the same.

And she has plenty of other distractions, too. The White Wolf takes Caingorn, half the cities of Redania, the northern half of Aedirn; Serrit enjoys the battles, enjoys using her skills to their fullest. She enjoys the hunting, too, being sent out with a handful of other Witchers to cleanse the White Wolf’s lands of monsters; there’s a pleasure to going into a hunt knowing that she has allies at her back, that whatever they face - even a leshen, even a whole nest of endregas - will be no match for their swords and Signs. Kaer Morhen acquires servants (baffling), a tiny child (loud), and then more mages (worrisome), and then one of the mages fixes the horror of the Trials and then the _old_ mages stick their big feet in their mouths, and Serrit joins the howling mob which tears the sadistic fuckers limb from limb. Letho acquires a small child who calls him her uncle and apparently thinks he’s delightful. The White Wolf acquires a bard, and the bard causes all _sorts_ of fairly entertaining chaos. Some days - some _weeks_ \- Serrit is almost too busy to even notice the faint ache of an injury she can’t even explain to her brothers, one which never bleeds and never heals.

*

Serrit doesn’t think about mages much. She stayed the hell out of the way of the ones in Gorthur Gvaed - the Trial of the Grasses was quite enough to teach her that she wanted _nothing_ to do with them - and she’s continued to stay out of their way in Kaer Morhen, both the old School mages before their massacre and the new Wolf-sworn mages, who are much less sadistic but still _mages_. Magic’s about the only thing a Witcher can’t cut with either silver or steel, so Serrit dislikes it on principle. Sure, Triss Merigold is decent people, and Seraphina spends most of her time helping the Cranes invent new bizarre weaponry, but still. Mages. Fuck ‘em.

And then the bard gets turned into a kid for almost a month, and then he gets turned _back_ , and Serrit sits there staring at the re-aged bard that night at supper and thinking as hard as she ever has in her life. If a sorceress can turn a man to a child and back again - if the rumors about the mages _choosing_ their own appearances when they graduate from their schools are correct - if they can do _that_ -

Serrit stares so long that Letho nudges her shoulder and gives her a genuinely worried look, and Serrit shakes herself and turns to her meal, but the thoughts whirling through her head are too loud to let her stay for the music after supper. She retreats to her room, and locks the door - she doesn’t usually bother; no one intrudes upon another’s territory, here - and digs through her clothes-chest until she finds, down at the very bottom, folded up into a tight wad, the skirt she acquired so long ago.

It’s still in decent condition. She shakes it out and looks at it for a long time, then swears and kicks out of her trousers and pulls it on.

It swirls around her ankles just the way it did the first time, heavy and soft. She lets her hair down, and shakes her head to make the ends of it brush against her neck and shoulders. And, for the first time, she tries to imagine what it might be like, to feel comfortable in her own skin. To not feel that edge of _wrongness_ every time she looks down at herself. To tell her brothers to call her _sister_.

The Grasses burn fear out of Witchers, but Serrit thinks this coldness in her gut might have been fear, if she were human still.

She sits down by the fire, and takes out her notebook, and for the first time in decades, lets herself draw that impossible shape - herself, as she should be. Every scar is in place, every mark of her years on the Path and in the Warlord’s army; the figure Serrit draws is Witcher and woman both, herself as she should have always been.

She does not burn the page, this time.

The next morning, she goes to Yennefer.

She’s never tried to _explain_ it before. It takes her a while to find the words, and she’s ready to storm out if she has to - ready to draw _steel_ if she has to. But Yennefer listens, violet eyes calm as stone, scent utterly unreadable - fucking _mages_ \- and frowns, and nods.

Yennefer warns that it will hurt, but what does a Witcher care about pain? She warns that she cannot strip away the mutations, cannot make Serrit _human_ again, but Serrit doesn’t want to be _human_. Fuck _that_. She just wants to be right in her own skin. Yennefer warns that she cannot make Serrit fertile, but Serrit’s never cared about _that_. If she ever wants a snakeling of her own, she’ll take a trainee as an apprentice or something, like the Bears and the Griffins do.

Yennefer nods again when Serrit says as much, and asks her what she wants to look like. Serrit swallows hard, and pulls out her notebook, opens it to the last filled page. Yennefer looks for a long, long moment, and, slowly, smiles.

It takes three days for Yennefer to prepare for the spell, and Serrit spends all three of them doing her best to exhaust herself on the sparring grounds, taking on any challenger. She even goes three rounds against the fucking _White Wolf_ , which is a very effective way to learn humility. No Witcher should be that strong _and_ that fast _and_ that sturdy. It’s fucking _annoying_ , is what it is. Also exhausting, though, which is what Serrit needs. Letho and Auckes and Zofia give her worried looks each night, but Vipers don’t exactly have heart-to-hearts, and Zofia has a finely honed sense of when it’s safe to ask questions and when questions would probably result in attempts at stabbing, so she doesn’t say a thing.

On the fourth day, Serrit turns up at Yennefer’s workroom again, and lies down where she’s directed to, and tries very hard not to think of the _last_ time she laid down on a stone table for a mage to change her forever.

It does hurt. It’s not as bad as the Grasses, but it does hurt, burns like fire running along every nerve. Serrit closes her teeth on the strip of leather Yennefer gave her and does not scream. The spell goes on for...a while; Serrit’s genuinely not sure how long. Long enough that she’s shaking by the end of it, and little formless sounds are snaking their way out around the leather strap. Long enough that her hands are clenched into fists so tight her knuckles creak, and she almost regrets that Yennefer didn’t strap her down.

Not long enough to make Serrit regret doing it, though.

The pain ebbs all at once, like water draining from a broken cup, and Serrit sits up and looks down and sees -

Herself.

Herself as she ought to be.

It’s a relief as sharp as the pain was, and almost harder to bear. Serrit clenches her hands on the edge of the table and _shakes_ with it. Yennefer, in a display of surprising empathy, turns away and waits for Serrit to pull herself back together.

Serrit thanks her as best she can - it’s not eloquent, but it apparently suffices. She goes back to her rooms, and finds a tunic and a pair of trousers that work well enough - apparently she’s going to have to go bother the seamstresses; her shoulders are still just as broad, but the tunic hangs differently, and the trousers fit oddly, too - and heads down to dinner. No point putting this off.

Her Schoolmates go silent as they see her approaching, and Serrit wraps her fingers around the handle of her favorite knife, its hilt still solid and comfortable in her hand, and waits to see how many people she’s going to need to stab.

Ivar considers her quietly for a long, tense moment. “Huh,” he says at last. “Curse, or on purpose?”

“On purpose,” Serrit says. Her voice is a little higher than it used to be; the words feel odd in her mouth, but she likes the way they sound.

Ivar nods and raises his mug a little. “Guess every snake needs to shed its skin once in a while,” he says.

Serrit nods back, and takes her usual seat, and the Vipers begin their usual mealtime chatter all around her. Zofia offers her a small smile, and a quiet murmur: “Let me know if you’ve got any questions, yeah?” Letho nudges his shoulder against hers and shoves a platter of venison over so she can reach it more easily.

Auckes says, thoughtfully, “Guess we can’t say it’s only the Cats that accept women anymore, sister.”

That’s all the fuss there is, which is frankly exactly how Serrit prefers it.

There’s really only one other person whose reaction Serrit is even a little worried about. She goes looking for Gweld after dinner, and finds him waiting at the end of the Wolf table, watching her approach. She glares at him, daring him to say something worth stabbing him for, and he grins the same way he always does when she glares. Stupid fearless _ass_.

“Well?” she demands.

He looks her up and down, and his grin gets softer somehow, less mischief and more genuine joy, and he says, “You look...right.”

...Guess she’s not stabbing him today after all. She glares at him a little more, just on principle, and then goes off to find the Cats and figure out what the hell has changed about her center of gravity, and how much she’s going to have to change her fighting style because of it.

*

It takes her two weeks to get used to her new center of gravity, the slight but unmistakable changes in the shape of her body and the way it moves, but she _does_ get used to it, and after two weeks of relentless training, is back to being able to beat Letho one bout in three, which has been her benchmark since they were trainees, so many decades ago. She puts herself back on the hunting roster, and goes out after a kikimora infestation, and comes back without even a scratch, feeling immensely pleased with herself. She lets Gweld flirt her into bed again, and finds to her mild annoyance that he’s just as good at it _now_ as he ever was before her transformation, and just as enthusiastic, too. It’s not _natural_ for a Witcher to be so good-natured.

She feels... _settled_ , in a way she never truly has before. Comfortable. That nameless longing has faded into nothingness, and the constant scraping pain of being called ‘brother’ is gone like a cut long-healed, and she is…

She is Serrit of the Vipers, who has shed the skin which did not suit her, and now wears the one she has always ought to have.

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to oranged-boy, Noodles, and FrenchKey for making sure I didn’t stick my foot in it too badly; any remaining mistakes and any offense caused are my fault and mine alone. Serrit of course is not representative of all trans people’s experiences. Please do tell me if I’ve fucked this up.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] As the Unchanging, Many-Colored Sea](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26457385) by [AceOfTigers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceOfTigers/pseuds/AceOfTigers)
  * [random arts for the Accidental Warlord series](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25657351) by [potofsoup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/potofsoup/pseuds/potofsoup)
  * [Storm in a Bottle](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28245747) by [gremble](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gremble/pseuds/gremble)




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